Create your own poem as part of the Power of Poetry! Transform your words into light and become one of our Rugby League World Cup Cultural Festival poets.
To get started, see some ideas and prompts from the Power of Poetry lead artist Robert Montgomery.
Submit and transform your words (up to 6 lines) into an artwork that you can download and keep. Share it using the hashtags #PowerOfPoetry #RLWC2021*
Include your name and email address to be included in our prize draw, for a chance to win a print of one of our poems and some Rugby League World Cup goodies!
Our poets wrote their poems collaboratively. Try joining forces with friends, classmates or family and see what you can make together. Find out more about how the poets wrote their poems with Robert, and to get some ideas for how you might go about writing together, click here.
Why not screenshot your poem and share the image too.
We also have a great writing exercise created for us by writer Joe Hakim, which is available to download here.
Poetry Prompts
Imagine the spectacle of a Rugby League World Cup match.
Imagine the noise emerging from the stadium as you walk towards it.
Now imagine we are a song being sung.
What would we say in the voice of the song?
or
Let's imagine we are different objects and phenomenon from around the stadium.
Are we the birds circling above the stadium?
Are we the wind?
Are we the grass?
You can choose anything.
Let's write a poem, for example, as if we were the ball being thrown into the scrum.
You could try these ideas out by writing together with someone else – a friend or friends, your classmates, family, colleagues, or in a group you are already part of.
Robert Montgomery: The Power of Poetry
A sketch of the collaboration process.
“During the Covid lockdowns I refined a pretty good process for writing collaborative poetry remotely. The process for the Rugby League World Cup poems is one in which each group writes together over 3 or 4 Zoom sessions, usually of an hour, sometimes a bit longer.
We have a shared Google doc on the go and we all write in different colours. This means we can talk and write together when we are all on Zoom, but also that any poet can come back to the document at any time and add, amend, make notes, write new lines.
When we are working together we work at the top of the page.
If you come back in on your own you write at the bottom of the page so when we come into a session we can scroll down and see if anyone added something totally inspired the previous night.
We usually end up with a medium length poem – maybe 25 lines.
This is the long poem, which we need to drastically cut down together to make the final poem.
In the end for the sculptures we cut them down to no more than 10 lines, 60 words. We do this final edit together too.
At this point we condense the poem down to its essence, its pure bones and light. We become kings and queens of the hard cut and the essence. The moonshine.”
Robert Montgomery, 2022